Month: January 2023

Genesis Global Trading, a subsidiary of the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) court late Thursday night.

Genesis Global Holdco and two of its lending business subsidiaries Genesis Global Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific filed voluntary petitions under the bankruptcy code for SDNY, its press release stated. “Genesis’s other subsidiaries involved in the derivatives and spot trading and custody businesses and Genesis Global Trading are not included in the filing and continue client trading operations,” it added.

Genesis stated it has over $150 million in cash, which it plans to use as liquidity to support its ongoing operations and facilitate its restructuring process.

As part of its filing, Genesis plans to consider a “dual track process” for sale, capital raise or equitization transaction that would potentially allow the business to “emerge under new ownership,” the release said.

The filing followed a series of attempts from Genesis to stay afloat.

The firm struggled to raise capital for its lending unit, cut 30% of its staff in early January and took a financial hit from major catastrophic crypto events last year like the collapse of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and the decline of crypto exchange FTX.

Genesis had a trading and lending relationship with both Three Arrows Capital and Alameda, FTX’s sister company, DCG’s CEO Barry Silbert shared in a letter from January 10.

“While we have made significant progress refining our business plans to remedy liquidity issues caused by the recent extraordinary challenges in our industry, including the default of Three Arrows Capital and the bankruptcy of FTX, an in-court restructuring presents the most effective avenue through which to preserve assets and create the best possible outcome for all Genesis stakeholders,” Derar Islim, interim CEO of Genesis, said in a statement on Thursday.

In mid-November 2022, Genesis halted withdrawals and new loan originations and later that month the firm warned of a possible bankruptcy filing as creditors looked for alternative options to prevent it. Around that time, a Genesis spokesperson told TechCrunch, “We have no plans to file bankruptcy imminently.” The spokespersson added, “Our goal is to resolve the current situation consensually without the need for any bankruptcy filing. Genesis continues to have constructive conversations with creditors.”

Aside from Genesis, DCG is the parent company of digital currency asset manager Grayscale, media company CoinDesk, mining and staking company Foundry, digital asset exchange and wallet Luno and API-centric platform TradeBlock. Silbert said in the mid-January letter that Genesis is a “separate and distinct operating subsidiary” from DCG.

On January 12, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Genesis and cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian Gemini for the unregistered offer and sale of securities to retail investors through Gemini Earn crypto asset lending program. The prosecutors said Genesis and Gemini raised billions of dollars’ worth of crypto assets from hundreds of thousands of investors.

“In November 2022, Genesis announced that it would not allow its Gemini Earn investors to withdraw their crypto assets because Genesis lacked sufficient liquid assets to meet withdrawal requests following volatility in the crypto asset market,” the SEC release stated. “At the time, Genesis held approximately $900 million in investor assets from 340,000 Gemini Earn investors. Gemini terminated the Gemini Earn program earlier this month. As of today, the Gemini Earn retail investors have still not been able to withdraw their crypto assets.”

This is a developing story and may be updated to reflect new information.

DCG’s crypto lending subsidiary Genesis files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Google will continue to challenge the Indian antitrust watchdog’s ruling but will cooperate with the authorities “on the way forward,” it said Friday, responding to a high-profile decision by the top Indian court this week that is cornering the Android-maker into making a series of changes that could topple how it conducts business in the key overseas market.

India’s Supreme Court on Thursday rejected Google’s plea to block an antitrust order, instead giving the Android-maker just one additional week to comply with the Competition Commission of India’s directions.

The matter will now go back to the country’s appellate tribunal, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), where Google previously failed to secure any relief. The Supreme Court has directed NCLAT to make its decision by March 31.

As TechCrunch wrote on Thursday, the challenge for Google is that unless NCLAT reaches a decision in Google’s favor by this month, the tech giant will have to make a series of changes to its business practices in India.

The CCI has ordered Google to not require licensing of its Play Store to be linked with mandating installation of several Google apps such as Chrome and YouTube. The watchdog has also ordered Google to allow removal of all its apps from phones and give smartphone users the ability to change their search engine provider.

The CCI also fined Google $162 million in its first order.

“We are reviewing the details of yesterday’s decision which is limited to interim relief and did not decide the merits of our appeal,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch.

“Android has greatly benefited Indian users, developers and OEMs and played a key role in India’s digital transformation. We remain committed to our users and partners and will cooperate with the CCI on the way forward, in parallel with our appeal.”

India is Google’s largest market by users. The firm, which has ploughed more than $10 billion in India over the past decade, has amassed over half a billion monthly active users in the country. The vast majority of the smartphones in India run Android.

Google warned earlier this month that if the Indian antitrust watchdog’s ruling is allowed to progress it would result in devices getting expensive in the South Asian market and lead to proliferation of unchecked apps that will posethreats for individual and national security.

Many Indian startups that compete with Google’s services welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision. Rohan Verma, chief executive of MapmyIndia, said he was “elated” by the decision, noting that Google requiring smartphone vendors to pre-install Google Maps had hurt MapmyIndia’s business outlook.

Rakesh Deshmukh, chief executive of Indus OS, an Android marketplace, called the court’s order a “watershed moment.”

Google to cooperate with Indian authorities after losing Android antitrust ruling bid by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

A $32 million seed round may seem like a throwback to frothier times like . . .2021. But that’s how much PLAI Labs just raised in a deal led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

It a lot of moolah in a volatile market, even coming as it does from two separate a16z funds: the firm’s $600 million debut games vehicle and its $4.5 billion crypto fund, both of which were announced last May.

Then again, PLAI Labs checks all the boxes on VCs’ wish lists.

First and foremost, the L.A.-based outfit was founded by veteran tech entrepreneurs Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb. The pair previously co-founded the once-hot social media platform MySpace (which originally sold to MySpace for $580 million in 2005) and the mobile game studio Jam City.

The latter remains privately held, but after scrapping plans to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, it managed to snag $350 million in funding in 2021 from Netmarble, Kabam, and affiliates of funds managed by Fortress Investment Group, which suggests it’s doing just fine. (Indeed, Jam City, which claims to have 30 million monthly active users, announced this morning that a third cofounder, Josh Yguado, is now running the show after serving as the company’s COO and president previously.)

Beyond being launched by seasoned founders, PLAI (pronounced /plā/) is also apparently weaving every buzzy trend into one offering, describing its own mission as leveraging “web3 and generative AI technology to offer the ultimate online social experience.”

Crypto? Check. Generative AI? Check. A new social platform? Where do I write the check, is the question the a16z team must have been asking.

For what it’s worth, PLAI’s first offering sounds compelling. We’re talking to DeWolfe in the next couple of days for more information, but in a blog post, a16z’s team describes that project, “Champions Ascension,” as a “massively multiplayer online role playing game where players can port in their existing non-fungible token (NFTs) characters, go on quests, trade items, fight in the colosseum, build their own custom dungeons, and more.”

PLAI, the post continues, is also “building an AI protocol platform,” one that aims to help users generate their own content and assets with the help of generative art protocols that the outfit says it has been developing.

Again, more details are coming.

In the meantime, the bet is just the latest by investor Andrew Chen, who currently leads the gaming practice at Andreessen Horowitz. Just two days ago, Carry1st, a publisher of social games and interactive content across Africa, said that had raised $27 million in “pre-Series B” funding from investors, including a16z.

Andreessen Horowitz also recently led an $8 million round in Gym Class, a VR-based basketball app that passed through the famed accelerator Y Combinator.

In the fall of 2021, before a16z’s gaming practice existed, its crypto team bet big on another NFT game, “Axie Infinity,” which invites users to “play to earn” crypto tokens that enable them to create and play with breedable characters called “Axies.” Though the game was big and growing at the time of that investment, the Ronin blockchain on which “Axie Infinity” is based was hacked last July and $620 million worth of crypto stolen.

The company, which is still trying to recover users funds, re-opened for business shortly afterward.

A $32 million seed round for Chris DeWolfe’s next gaming biz defies 2023 trends by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

Copilot, a platform aimed at helping companies, including marketing agencies, accounting firms and law firms, run and grow their businesses, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by YC Continuity and Lachy Groom at a $100 million post-money valuation. Co-founder and CEO Marlon Misra said that the funds will be put toward expanding Copilot’s team, particularly on the engineering and product organization side, to build a “Shopify-like” app store specifically for services business.

“While in the first two years we focused on building a great core product, future years will center around building out our platform,” Misra told TechCrunch in an email interview, noting that Copilot has raised $13 million in capital to date. “Thousands of tech-enabled services businesses including marketing agencies, financial services companies, consulting firms, law firms and various types of startups run on Copilot.”

“When the pandemic first started, the most immediate effect was companies closing their physical offices and investing more in their online presence, online customer acquisition and new software. Many companies tried to reinvent themselves as online-first businesses, which is why there’s now this big trend toward building these online, modern, customer-centric and highly automated businesses,” Misra said. “The economic slowdown in the economy that succeeded the pandemic exacerbated the need to be efficient. And here, we saw companies once again looking for more ways to automate and find more ways to consolidate their software stack. That’s benefitting us.”

Copilot lands $10M to help service businesses build digital customer experiences by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

In a financial filing on Thursday, T-Mobile revealed that a hacker accessed a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers.

The telecom giant said that the “bad actor” started stealing the data, which includes “name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of lines on the account and plan features,” since November 25.

In the SEC filing, T-Mobile said it detected the breach more than a month later, on January 5, and that within a day it had fixed the problem that the hacker was exploiting.

The hackers, according to T-Mobile, didn’t breach any company system but rather abused an application programming interface, or API.

“Our investigation is still ongoing, but the malicious activity appears to be fully contained at this time, and there is currently no evidence that the bad actor was able to breach or compromise our systems or our network,” the company wrote.

This is the eighth time T-Mobile was hacked since 2018. The most recent incident was in 2022, when a group of hackers known as Lapsus$ were able to gain access to the company’s internal tools, which gave them the chance to carry out so-called SIM swaps, a type of hack where hackers take over a victim’s phone number and then try to leverage that to reset and access the target’s sensitive accounts such as email or cryptocurrency wallets.

T-Mobile did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

T-Mobile says hacker accessed personal data of 37 million customers by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai originally published on TechCrunch

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Thursday! This week has just flown by, and we’re still reeling from the excitement that a company is leaning into compliments. Compliments? In this day and age? Is there actually hope for us after all?! Well, we have a compliment for ya, Mike — thank you for spreading some joy into our day today! —Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Amazon turned that smile upside down: Shopping for charity is going to not be a thing for Amazon after February. Amid layoffs and other cuts, the delivery giant said it was ending its AmazonSmile program to focus on other philanthropic endeavors of its own, Romain reports.
Give ’em what they want: Mike writes that “German teens went crazy for Slay’s app that gives compliments,” and now venture capitalists are getting in on the fun and backing its next phase.
Storefront builder’s gold mine: Oro, an open source e-commerce platform, is going against the grain of other platforms by targeting businesses. That approach is paying off as the company announces $13 million in new funding. Paul has more.

Startups and VC

People are addicted to credit cards — and it’s no wonder, given the lucrative rewards that many of them offer. But for merchants, credit cards tend to be less appealing, Kyle reports. Merchants are on the hook for interchange fees, or transaction fees a merchant’s bank must pay whenever a customer uses a card to make a purchase. Link comes to the rescue, and the company raised $30 million to help merchants accept direct bank payments. You know, like consumers in Europe have been able to do since the 1990s.

In recent years, working for, or banking with, a traditional financial institution was decidedly uncool. Far cooler was working for or banking with one of the many fintech startups that seemed to thumb their nose at stodgy bank brands, Connie reports. A lot of fintechs “have to fix their business models,” according to fintech-investing VCs.

And we have five more for you:

It’s better than yours: Outrider brings all their autonomous electric trucks to yard, and they’re, like, it’s better than yours, Kirsten reports, as the company raises $73 million to brings its autonomous electric yard trucks into the mainstream.
Someone let the air out of space: Private investment in space companies dropped 58% last year, even with SpaceX and Anduril monster raises, Aria reports.
Feeling the pressure: Brian reports that dry-cleaning robotics startup Presso raised another $8 million.
Call me on my $ell phone: India’s PhonePe tops $12 billion valuation in new funding, Manish reports.
Who needs designers anyway: Scenario lands $6 million for its AI platform that generates game art assets, reports Kyle.

Teach yourself growth marketing: How to boot up an email marketing campaign

In the third article of a five-part series, growth marketing expert Jonathan Martinez (Uber, Postmates, Chime) explains how to create and optimize email campaigns that will “push consumers through your funnel and drive conversions.”

Martinez shares fundamentals for segmenting customers and anticipating where leaks will occur along the funnel you’re developing. Startups that recapture these users can eke out a higher ARR, and every little bit counts.

“It is crucial to distill user segments as much as possible because we must ensure that we’re sending the right messaging to the right consumers.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

Worrying and getting worse: Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, which represents a drop from 2021, Dominic-Madori reports.
Tearin’ into the decks: Haje’s weekly Pitch Deck Teardown is here. This week he takes a closer look at Scrintal’s $1 million seed deck.
Response is for the birds: Twitter’s data leak response is a lesson in how not to do cybersecurity, reports Carly.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

We know, it’s hard to put that phone down, and all those distracting dings and buzzes don’t help. Well, Instagram’s got your back with a Quiet Mode that helps you take a break from the app and even tells your peeps you are on DND. Sarah writes that this is just one of several new changes on the app, including some other time management tools and expanded parental controls.

Meanwhile, fast fashion ain’t what it used to be…valued at. Rita reports that Shein is reportedly accepting a lower valuation as it seeks to raise $3 billion in new funding. The company is said to be raising on a $64 billion valuation, down from the $100 billion price tag in April; however, “Shein denies the accuracy of some of the information,” she writes.

And we have five more for you:

We want s’more Smores: Smores, a music discovery app, wants to show you the songs you’ve been dying to hear, but in a way you want it and with a TikTok-like feed, Ivan writes.
One way or another: Over in Europe, Natasha L reports that Meta dodged a €4 billion privacy fine over unlawful ads, while WhatsApp gets its hand slapped for processing data without a lawful basis.
They’re not spending like they used to: Ron reports that analysts cut their 2023 tech spending predictions as the economy forces consumers to scale back.
Is it that time already?: FTX’s new CEO is now saying there’s a possibility for the crypto exchange to restart. Jacquelyn has more.
Someone has a “420” obsession: Elon Musk’s now famous tweet about taking Tesla private could lose him billions as it plays out in trial, Rebecca reports.

Daily Crunch: Amazon cancels charitable donation initiative so it can focus on ‘programs with greater impact’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

After cutting off prominent app makers like Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter today quietly updated its developer terms to ban third-party clients altogether.

Spotted by Engadget, the “restrictions” section of Twitter’s 5,000-some-word developer agreement was updated with a clause prohibiting “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.” Earlier this week, Twitter said that it was “enforcing long-standing API rules” in disallowing clients access to its platform but didn’t cite which specific rules developers were violating. Now we know — retroactively.

As Engadget notes, Twitter clients are a part of Twitter history — Twitterific was created before Twitter had a native iOS app of its own. And they’ve gained a larger following in recent years, thanks in part to their lack of ads.

Twitter’s attitude toward third-party clients has long been permissive and even supportive, with the company going so far as to remove a section from its developer terms that discouraged devs from replicating its core service. But that seems to have changed under CEO Elon Musk’s leadership.

The decision seems unlikely to foster goodwill toward Twitter at a time when the platform faces challenges on a number of fronts. In a blog post, Twitterrific’s Sean Heber called Twitter “increasingly capricious” and a company he “no longer recognize[d] as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.” Matteo Villa, the developer of Fenix, in an interview with Engadget called the lack of communication “insulting.” (Twitter has no communications department at present.)

Twitter is under immense pressure to turn a profit — or at least break even — as advertisers flee the platform, spurred by unpredictable, fast-changing content policies. The company, which has $12.5 billion in debt, is on the hook for $300 million in its first interest payment and has lost an estimated $4 billion in value since Musk acquired it at the end of October 2022. Fidelity recently slashed the value of its stake in Twitter by 56%.

Cutbacks at Twitter abound. Some employees are bringing their own toilet paper to work after the company reduced janitorial services, the New York Times reported, and Twitter has stopped paying rent for several of its offices. Musk has elsewhere attempted to save around $500 million in costs unrelated to labor, shutting down a data center and launching a fire sale after putting office items up for auction in a bid to recoup costs.

Twitter’s also heavily pushing its Twitter Blue plan (now with an annual option), aiming to make it a profit driver. It plans to lift its ban on political ads, chasing after campaign dollars in the 2024 U.S. elections. And the company is reportedly considering selling usernames through online auctions.

Twitter officially bans third-party clients after cutting off prominent devs by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla CEO Elon Musk oversaw a 2016 video that overstated the capabilities of the automaker’s driver assistance system, Autopilot, according to internal emails viewed by Bloomberg. The emails show that Musk even dictated the opening tagline of the video that claimed the car drove itself. Earlier this week, a deposition from a senior engineer revealed that the car hadn’t been driving itself and had instead been following a pre-determined route along a high-definition map.

False and misleading

Elluswamy’s deposition was taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a fatal 2018 crash involving former Apple engineer Walter Huang. The lawsuit alleges that errors by Autopilot, and Huang’s misplaced trust in the capabilities of the system, caused the crash.

State and federal agencies and customers have also called out Tesla for falsely promoting the capabilities its driver assistance systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (which is not actually fully self-driving), even though Tesla does advise its drivers to stay alert and focused while the systems are engaged.

Last July, the California Department of Motor Vehicles accused Tesla of falsely advertising its systems, something a handful of Tesla customers also alleged in a September lawsuit against the company.

Additionally, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is actively investigating two crashes related to Autopilot. Tesla is also potentially facing a criminal investigation from the Department of Justice over its self-driving claims.

Musk oversaw misleading 2016 video saying Tesla drove itself by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

It looks like Dungeons & Dragons just succeeded on a death-saving throw. After weeks of backlash and protests from fans and content creators, Wizards of the Coast — the Hasbro-owned publisher of Dungeons & Dragons — announced that it will now license the tabletop role-playing game’s core mechanics under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This gives the community “a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license” to publish and sell works based on Dungeons & Dragons.

“Overall, what we’re going for here is giving good-faith creators the same level of freedom (or greater, for the things in Creative Commons) to create TTRPG content that’s been so great for everyone, while giving us the tools to ensure the game continues to become ever more inclusive and welcoming,” wrote Dungeons & Dragons executive producer Kyle Brink in a blog post.

This is a massive change of heart for the gaming giant. Earlier this month, Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) sent a document with a new open gaming license (OGL) to top Dungeons & Dragons content creators, asking them to sign what they called “OGL 1.1.” Some creators leaked the document in protest, exposing its predatory terms that would suffocate the prolific fan community and collapse some creators’ businesses. The now-retracted OGL 1.1 would have required any Dungeons & Dragons creator earning over $50,000 to write reports to WoTC, and any making over $750,000 to start paying a 25% royalty. These numbers might seem high, but these figures refer to gross revenue, not income — and the industry of third-party Dungeons & Dragons content is so large that the impact would be severe. Other creators worried about a clause in the contract that would allow WoTC to publish their work, potentially without credit or payment.

Over 77,000 creators and fans signed an open letter against these changes, and some went as far as canceling their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, an online platform for the game. Finally, WoTC admitted that they “rolled a 1” — for those uninitiated in TTRPG-speak, that means they screwed up really, really bad.

“There’s no royalty payment, no financial reporting, no license-back, no registration, no distinction between commercial and non-commercial. Nothing will impact any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a. That will always be licensed under OGL 1.0a. Your stuff is your stuff,” Brink wrote in today’s blog post. Later in the post, he affirms again, “You own your content. You don’t give Wizards any license-back, and for any ownership disputes, you can sue for breach of contract and money damages.”

The draft of the new OGL under Creative Commons — known as OGL 1.2 — is a big improvement from the last document. But some fans remain worried about terms that impact virtual tabletops and works already licensed under the original OGL, which dates back to 2000. Virtual tabletop (VTT) software helps people play games like Dungeons & Dragons when they’re not in the same room, and of course, these products exploded during the pandemic. Dungeons & Dragons does not currently have its own VTT, though. As part of the new OGL, WoTC wrote a draft of a brand-new VTT policy.

According to the VTT policy, it’s okay for developers to display content from the Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks. But WoTC is wary of content that is “more like a video game” than a TTRPG.

“What isn’t permitted are features that don’t replicate your dining room table storytelling,” the document says. “If you replace your imagination with an animation of the Magic Missile streaking across the board to strike your target, or your VTT integrates our content into an NFT, that’s not the tabletop experience.”

As far as content published under the original OGL goes, WoTC says that content already published will remain licensed, but moving forward, the old license will be deauthorized.

Tomorrow, WoTC will update the blog post with a link for fans to provide feedback — this survey will remain open until February 3. Then, within the following two weeks, WoTC will issue another update.

“The process will extend as long as it needs to. We’ll keep iterating and getting your feedback until we get it right,” Brink wrote.

This is a promising first step for Dungeons & Dragons to regain its fans’ trust. But when you make a death-saving roll, you have to succeed three times before your character can get back into the fray. Hopefully WoTC leadership keeps making good dice rolls.

Dungeons & Dragons’ publisher will put the game under a Creative Commons license by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings announced Thursday that he would step down after more than two decades at the company.

While news of his departure comes as a shock, Hastings noted that Netflix has planned its next era of leadership “for many years” in the announcement, which was shared on the company’s blog.

In 2020, Netflix named Ted Sarandos, who has long led content efforts at the company, as co-CEO alongside Hastings. At the time, Netflix characterized the change as formalizing the way that the company was already operating.

Netflix will maintain the co-CEO structure in Hasting’s absence, promoting COO Greg Peters to the tandem role with Sarandos.

“It was a baptism by fire, given COVID and recent challenges within our business,” Hastings said of Sarandos and Peters taking the reins.

“But they’ve both managed incredibly well, ensuring Netflix continues to improve and developing a clear path to reaccelerate our revenue and earnings growth. So the board and I believe it’s the right time to complete my succession.”

Hastings will stay involved with the company as executive chairman of the board, following a precedent shared by other prominent major tech company founders including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings steps down as co-CEO by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch